A typical communication system, such as a trunked or conventional communication system, comprises a communication resource allocator, a plurality of communication resources, a plurality of consoles, and a plurality of communication units. Generally, the plurality of communication units, which may be mobile vehicle units or portable personal units, are arranged into related groups. For example, communication units operated by a city's police force may form one group, while communication units operated by the city's fire department, dog catcher units, highway crews, and civil engineers may form other groups. The groups may be further divided into sub groups, for example, the police group may be divided by districts such as police 1, police 2, etc. (For trunked communication systems, groups of communication units are arranged into fleets and/or sub fleets; for conventional communication systems, groups of communication units are affiliated with at least one particular communication resource.)
The plurality of consoles, which may be devices as defined in Motorola Inc. publication No. R4-2-37C, March 1988, entitled System Planner, perform supervisory functions for assigned groups and/or subgroups. Typically, each console performs supervisory functions such as resetting emergency conditions, manually reconfiguring the system, and transmitting at a priority level. Resetting emergency conditions consists of answering an emergency call, resetting audio and/or visual emergency call indicators and deactivating the manual system reconfiguration.
For example, if an emergency condition arises on a particular console, the operator of the console, upon receiving an emergency indication, would determine which group initiated the emergency. After determining which group initiated the emergency, the operator manually reconfigures the communication system. The system reconfiguration may comprise manually patching two or more groups together, where the groups to be patched together are determined by the operator based on the group initiating the emergency. (Call patching may be defined as a process for allowing two or more groups that normally do not communicate with each other to do so.) A difficulty arises if a group that is not presently monitored by the console is to be part of the call patch. Under such conditions, the operator must assign the required group before activating the call patch. Typically, the operator must deassign a group that he is presently monitoring such that he can add the group that is to be part of the call patch.
Generally, several seconds (about 5 to 15 seconds) are required to perform a manual call patch. Additional time may be spent if a human error occurs as a result of an improperly executed call patch. In several emergency situations, the first few seconds are critical and may be the difference between life and death. Therefore, a need exists for a communication system that performs system reconfigurations automatically such that execution time is reduced, potential for human error is reduced, and previous system limitaions are overcome.